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DALBADI, Pakistan — Survivors built makeshift shelters with sticks and bedsheets yesterday, a
day after their mud houses were flattened in an earthquake that killed 285 people in southwestern
Pakistan and pushed up a new island out of the Arabian Sea. While waiting for help to reach remote
villages, hungry people dug through the rubble to find food.

And the country’s poorest province struggled with a dearth of medical supplies, hospitals and
other aid.

The quake flattened wide swathes of Awaran district, where it was centered, leaving much of the
population homeless.

Almost all of the 300 mud-brick homes in the village of Dalbadi were destroyed.

Noor Ahmad said he was working when the quake struck and rushed home to find his house leveled
and his wife and son dead.

“I’m broken,” he said. “I have lost my family.”

At least 373 people were injured, according to a statement from the National Disaster Management
Authority, which gave the latest death toll.

The remoteness of the area and the lack of infrastructure hampered relief efforts. Awaran
district is one of the poorest in the country’s most-impoverished province.

Just getting to victims was challenging in a region with almost no roads, where many people use
four-wheel-drive vehicles and camels to traverse the rough terrain.

“We need more tents, more medicine and more food,” said a spokesman for the provincial
government, Jan Mohammad Bulaidi.

The Pakistani military said it had rushed about 1,000 troops to the area overnight and was
sending helicopters as well. A convoy of 60 army trucks left the port city of Karachi early
yesterday with supplies.

The area where the quake struck is at the center of an insurgency that Baluch separatists have
been waging against the Pakistani government for years. The separatists regularly attack Pakistani
troops and symbols of the state, such as infrastructure projects.

Tuesday’s shaking was so violent it drove up mud and earth from the sea floor to create a new
island.

A Pakistani navy team reached the island by midday yesterday. Navy geologist Mohammed Danish
told the country’s Geo Television that the mass was a little wider than a tennis court and slightly
shorter than a football field.

Similar land masses appeared off Pakistan’s coast after quakes in 1999 and 2010, said Muhammed
Arshad, a hydrographer with the navy. They eventually disappeared during the rainy season.